There are three real bears of problems that whoever becomes president in January 2009 will have to face.

One is the coming credit-card market plunge into the ravine, which will make the current subprime mortgage mess look like a baby's dribble. The second is an absolute mess in foreign affairs. The third is the appalling, economically crippling fact that only seven of 10 young Americans graduate from high school.

Presidential candidates for the most part operate at a level of generality well above the issues they will actually have to deal with when they are president. This is partly so that their campaign speeches won't bore audiences. Imagine the less-than-intense enthusiasm of a gym full of people for a talk on the political dynamics of South Asia. The second reason is that the issues are truly complex and efforts to parse them at a level where voters can differentiate between the candidates' positions are likely to fail.

Yet, all three of these issues -- credit, schooling and foreign affairs -- are critical to our country's future and waiting out there for the next president like a collapsed bridge on the darkened road ahead.

The parallels between the subprime mortgage disaster and the waiting credit-card tragedy are frighteningly real. Americans carry heavy credit-card debt -- nearly a trillion dollars. Whether they will be able to meet their payments in the months ahead as the costs of essentials rise, disposable income shrinks, wages lag behind inflation, job creation continues to fizzle and people's homes no longer are available as piggybanks is a very good question, probably with a horrible negative answer.

Nonetheless, banks and other financial institutions have bundled credit-card debt, as they did with subprime mortgages, and issued bonds against them. Those "securities" are now held as collateral by banks and financial institutions just as bonds based on bundled mortgages were. It is likely that the bonds based on credit-card debt are as worthless as those based on subprime mortgages, but they nonetheless play the same important role as the subprime paper did in the all-too-clever U.S. and world financial markets.

The credit-card debt collapse will begin shortly, at the consumer level, as increasing numbers of credit-card holders can no longer pay even the minimums on their accounts. This probably will happen before the next president even takes office.

The second of the three head-splitting problems was signalled for us by a mistake made by one of the three principal candidates last week. It turned out that this candidate did not know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites and the organizations and countries they were affiliated with in the Middle East and South Asia. (That's the Middle East, where the oil comes from, the Iraq war has been going on for five years and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is as brown as last weekend's Easter lily. South Asia is where 9/11 originated and the Taliban and al-Qaida hang out.)

Now, for Americans, the bar of knowledge of world events and personalities may have dropped perhaps as low as it can go with the extraordinarily incurious, ignorant President Bush. At the same time, Mr. Bush probably knows that Iran is basically Shiite and that al-Qaida is Sunni. I do not expect candidates to be able to whip off the name of the prime minister of Croatia or the religious distribution of the people of Malaysia, but there is a minimum that the new president will need to be able to keep in his head if he is to make sense of the briefings he will receive from our intelligence agencies. As to the moments when he will need to try to make reasonable decisions as to what actions the United States should take in the face of important developments around the world, it will be far too late then to learn the fundamental facts about other places and people.

It wouldn't matter if the United States didn't matter. But it does. For better or for worse we are tangled up with the world, economically and politically. There is nothing more to discuss about globalization. It is a simple fact of life. Watch the Asian and European stock markets reel and rock as a result of stupid decisions made at the American community level, where some banker gave someone a loan he couldn't afford to pay back.

The third problem might be the worst, because it bears directly on the future of our young people and their ability to cope in the world they are walking into. It turns out that some states, to perpetuate their access to federal money for education, have been lying to the public and the federal government about the percentage of students their high schools have been graduating. That's bad enough, but, even worse, the percentage of young Americans graduating from high school is running at a terrifyingly low 70 percent.

Never mind what a high school diploma is still worth. Imagine what kind of employment -- if any -- someone who isn't even a high school graduate can aspire to. Imagine even how someone with that level of education can function in our society -- dealing with ATM machines, drivers' licenses, voting, executing a contract for a cell phone, never mind the small print, even making purchases in super markets.

So where, exactly, are we going? Someone better figure it out and try to devise programs for dealing with these problems. Solutions are out there, but they are devilishly complicated. We had better hope that we elect someone with the qualities of intellect and character to cope with these puzzles.